Rainy Bar is a public interactive space at the side of streets, aiming to explore the way how people enjoy the rain. People inside can interact with music and raindrops.

Category: Interactive Installation

Duration: 3 Weeks

Team: 4 People

Role: Team lead, Co-Research, Co-Ideation, Sketch & Modeling

Tools: Photoshop, Rhino, Keyshot, Arduino, Processing

Tags: #Rain #Music #Public Space

Here is a sound for you to immerse yourself into the rain:

Many people hate rainy days because of its inconvenience, and designers constantly solve hundreds of problems with rainy days.

Images from Baidu, 2017

However, would they really solve the problems? Not really. They are more likely to avoid and resist the inconvenience of rainy days.

Why not, from a different perspective, take advantage of the features of rain to create a new experience of rainy days and let people begin to enjoy the rain?

HOW do people enjoy the rain?

Images from Baidu, 2017

There are lots of artistic works expressing the enjoyable emotion brought with rain. Rain always inspires people to come up with fantastic ideas.

In the art works of musics, photographs and movies, there are mainly three enjoyable emotion of people towards the rain: Peaceful, Refresh, Release.

WHAT DOES PEOPLE THINK ABOUT RAINY DAYS?

—Describe a rainy day which brought you a good mood.

—What is your feelings, in human’s five senses, about the rain?

—Describe your feelings of rain through some words ?

“Rainy day reminds me of the good feeling of the misty rainy scene, which is very visually comfortable. Also, the slightly humid air with petrichor makes me feel fresh.”

—Frank, 30, Product Manager

“I prefer to study in rainy days, because, at that time, I feel more focused on my work, some excellent ideas come into my mind at that time.”

—Jamie, 23, Design Intern

“If there is a drizzled rainy day after a long period of warm, dry weather, I would go out to play with the rain and dance in the grassland. It’s pretty enjoyable.”

—Julia, 21, Student

“The raindrops on the glass are like a special kind of visual pattern, and sometimes the ticktack of raindrops makes me feel at muse.”

—Ben, 32, Public Servant

MAIN FINDING:

Most people hate the rainy days because of its inconvenience rather than hating the rain itself. They don’t like to get wetted by the rain but like to watch the rain indoors. Also, we found the Visual & Auditory features of rain are most compelling to people.

Why will Visual & Auditory features of rain attractive?

Images from Baidu, 2017

Photos taken in OnePear, Shanghai, 2017

Rainy day provides an obscure, soft, misty, low contrast scene, and rain sound is a kind of white noise, making people feel peaceful, and focused. Based on these features, the rainy day provides people a kind of anti-social ambience and make people feel relaxed.

Can we create an enjoyable experience of rainy days by combine rain scene and rain sound?

INSPIRATION

Images from Baidu, 2017

Final Concept: Inspired by the attraction of rainy vision & sound, we decided to design a public interactive installation at the curbside, Rainy Bar, for people to retreat from the hustle and bustle of urbanism in rainy days.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

When people first come into Rainy Bar, they will saw the rain curtain and hear peaceful rain sound due to the default setting of the peaceful mode and then they can change the interaction mode by using the control panel in front of the rainy screen.

What can Rainy Bar do?

Rainy Bar provides people an immersive space to interact with raindrop and music, when they play music, the raindrop will fall according to the melody.